What Is Twitter?

According to Wikipedia:

“Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterific or Facebook.”

You can use it to share what you are doing right now (i.e. working on my blog, going out to lunch with girlfriends, etc.) and everyone who comes to your page can read it and everyone who “follows” you will get an update instantly.

So, first you go to Twitter.com and register as a user. You find people who you know (or who you don’t know yet) to “follow.” This is similar to making “friends” on other social networking sites like MySpace for instance. You can search by key words for things you are interested in too and that way you can follow people with your same interests. You do not have to be approved to follow someone and you do not have to approve others to allow them to follow you.

When you are logged in on Twitter’s site your “home” page will show all of your “tweets” (entries), as well as, all of the entries of anyone you are following. So what do people tweet about? Anything and everything. I like to follow other internet marketers and see what they are up to for the day. Sometimes they will tweet about a new blog post that I might want to go read. Some people tweet about where they are going on vacation, what they are eating, what they are reading … you just never know.

Once you get the hang of it you will find ways to use it for promoting your business. But, like any other type of social marketing you should be there to socialize and make connections. Then when you have a new blog post or something cool going on in your business you can tweet about it. If people are interested they will go check it out.

Remember you are only allowed 140 characters (not words – characters) so keep it short and to the point. You can however use a tool to shorten urls so that helps with driving traffic to your sites or articles.

To get an idea of what I’m talking about go to http://www.twitter.com/wahmsuzanne and look at my page. This will show you my most recent tweets. Unless you are registered and logged in you won’t be able to see the interaction between me and everyone I’m following but you’ll get some idea. Register and follow me and I’ll follow you back. See you on Twitter!

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